Margaret Hilda Thatcher: Lest we forget

Baroness Thatcher, the longest-serving British Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in the 20th century had been laid to rest at the age of 87. She was better remembered as The “The Iron Lady” – a paradox indeed for the first woman to be British Prime Minister. Rabidly anti-communist, her globally “uncompromising politics and leadership style” made a Soviet journalist to so nickname her, Iron Lady.

In Africa, we dare not speak ill of the dead. Certainly nobody would ever recommend a Thatcher Death party the type which before her burial reportedly attracted some hundreds in London, who had fun rather than shedding tears for a Prime Minister, whose poverty -inducing policies in Britain are known as Thatcherism.

But while we are enjoined to miss a departed soul, some of the post mortem exaggerated tributes from Africa are too good to be believed about the Iron Lady. Indeed some tributes by their factual untruths amount to speaking ill of the dead. During her reign (without royal entitlement!) the no-no woman never gave in to flattery and praise singing. I recall that in 1988, Mrs. Margaret Thatcher visited Nigeria. The tour was greeted by NLC-led mass anti-apartheid protest. She actually declined to take along her BARB horse gift given to her by the Emir of Kano, Alhaji Ado Bayero. Definitely I bet that Maggie who rejected a royal horse gift would dismiss posthumous, unsolicited and certainly undeserved, attributions.

President Goodluck Jonathan while condoling the government and people of Britain on the death of its former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said in a statement signed by the President’s spokesman Reuben Abati, that; “The late Baroness Thatcher will always be remembered by the world for her very unique, distinctive and purposeful leadership which restored pride and respect to her country and made a resurgent Great Britain a force to be reckoned with on the global stage.” These tributes were mere words without historic justifications. What made Thatcher’s leadership “unique”, “purposeful” for our continent?

The bane of contemporary African leadership is lack of memory and accountability. The generous posthumous assessment of Margaret Thatcher once again shows that some African leaders are eager to impress outside powers rather than being accountable to their peoples.

True to her divisive character, Thatcher while in office made two rancorous visits to Africa characterised by protests and condemnations against her notorious racist support for the discredited apartheid terror-regime. A woman who in defiance of the world and unapologetically saw Nelson Mandela as “a terrorist” deserving no freedom from Robben Island maximum prison (instead of a freedom fighter Madiba is) offered no purposeful leadership neither for Africa nor for Britain where anti-apartheid feeling was rooted in spite of her obstinacy. Undoubtedly, the sudden resignation of Thatcher as British Prime Minister on November 22, 1990 after her humiliation by her conservative party was one big relief for Africa. Long before the war in the gulf in 1990, her African policy passed for political and economic equivalent of war(s) against a continent. Thanks to the scores of her doctrinaire policies (read: missiles) for which the continent lacked the capacity (read: patriots) to repel.

Apartheid South Africa thrived on Thatcher’s ‘no-sanctions’ policy. The popular belief was that both the liberation efforts and sanctions by the international community would bring the racist Boers to reason and negotiation table. For her, sanctions campaign was ‘absurd’ and commonwealth-after-commonwealth, she could not conceal her annoyance about the fact that sanctions would not set out ‘to relive the poverty and starvation’ in South Africa. She single handedly subverted reasoned positions of the of the Commonwealth’s Eminent Persons’ Group (EPG) on apartheid and guaranteed British security for the most inhuman system on the globe.

Former President Olusegun Obasanjo commendably unmasked Thatcher’s outlook in a personal letter, sent to her published in an edition of British Financial Times, when he told her thus: “Many people around the world view your continued opposition to sanctions as founded in instinct, not logic and as displaying a misguided tribal loyalty and myopic political vision…”

She mischievously taunted the repeal of the so-called Mixed Marriage Act by Pik Botha as evidence of her romance with apartheid. General Obasanjo reportedly asked Thatcher if all 25 million blacks were fighting for was to “marry or have sex with five million whites” adding that the “mental laager of the Boer seem to be mirrored” in Thatcher’s “own attitudes”.

Thatcher’s UK did not promote any decolonisation policy or initiative on Namibia. On the contrary, Cold war perspective beclouded the policy perception of the legitimate efforts of SWAPO to restore the usurped rights of black men and women. The struggle for independence was reduced to a ‘regional ideological conflict’ according to which a ‘linkage’ existed between the withdrawal of the Cuban troops in Angola and the independence of Namibia. Indeed, with the unscheduled visit of Mrs. Thatcher to Windhoek in September, 1989, the world nearly had a caricature of UN Resolution 435 on Namibian independence as she displayed colonial bias and wrongly accused SWAPO of ‘disrupting’ decolonisation process, she never believed in the first instance. Africa problem-solving was never her specialisation in office.

Her worst footprint was on the global economy. Obviously not by accident, her tenure coincided with the worst economic crisis in Africa: balance of payment crisis, collapse of primary goods’ prices, poverty and unemployment. These crises were in themselves attributable to the debt crisis. Maggie was ruthlessly committed to debt collection and the better if the structural ‘adjustment’ programme lacked a human face. Britain was the home of the ‘Club of private creditors’. The Prime Minister was committed to neo- liberal free enterprise at home, never hesitated to export same abroad with the support for IMF and World Bank reforms. Thus the continent became a showcase of mutually exclusive competitive policies of devaluation, liberalisation, privatisation and cuts in public spending.

The results: unemployment, brain drain, decline in income, and ‘perverse flow of resources’ through debt repayment. Her tenure was the same as SAP-military imposed regimes in Africa. She suffered no democracy rhetoric in Africa; she administered UK at a time constitutionalism was trampled upon by corrupt military adventurers in notable commonwealth states of Nigeria and Ghana. As recent as 2004, Sir Mark Thatcher, the son of Lady Thatcher, was arrested and charged over claims that he was involved in a plot to overthrow the government of Equatorial Guinea.

Let’s forgive but we dare not forget her dubious African legacy. The defunct West Africa Weekly summed up Mrs. Thatcher’s tenure thus: ‘Mrs. Thatcher never developed a coherent policy that remotely took account of the genuine interests of African people…’